What do you look for when you’re determining what’s good media?

One of our friends started a blog and is working on figuring out what sort of media to review. As such, she asked her friends and followers,

what [do] you look for when you’re determining what’s good media and what isn’t. So – what are categories you consider for your media (i.e., plot, characterization, writing/play style, etc.).

I feel like I both gave a good answer and was maddeningly unhelpful… so I guess I wanted to explore both of those aspects.

As to an answer, I said that for me, when I’m considering media, when I’m exploring and looking for new media, I feel most rewarded when I follow the creators I’ve already enjoyed something by.

Media in general is a tough term, since these days just so many different media – and we talk about most all of them here on Comparative Geeks, so we’re consuming all of these things. YouTube, Social Media, Podcasts, music, movies, TV shows, streaming service shows, books, comics…

If you shape the question another way, as to something like audience level, we’re consuming children’s, YA, adult, and beyond (I’ve said it before… no one is old enough for Game of Thrones!).

Even if you go by genre, sure, we tend towards Science Fiction and Fantasy, but that’s by no means all the media we consume. Nor is it all something that we would inherently call “geeky” – shocking, I know!

So with so many different media that we’re consuming, enjoying, seeking out, reviewing, discussing… I mean, it’s hard to come up with an answer to this. It’s also the sort of question that we’re constantly asking ourselves as we run this site. There’s plenty of stuff we think about discussing that we don’t – because we don’t feel like we have enough to say, or anything interesting or new to say, or we don’t feel like it’s timely.

Overall, the question asked feels like the fundamental question of blogging: what are you looking for in what you spend your time on, and what are you looking for from what I write?

So back to my answer.

I didn’t name anything specific, but I talked about pursuing the creators you like. And after listing so many different types of media, “creator” can be taken really loosely as well! One of my earliest examples of this is music – I find an artist I like (through any number of sources), and then I check out as much as I can get my hands on by them. There are authors where I’ve read probably 20+ books by them… Peter David and R.A. Salvatore come to mind.

One of my more recent examples is in getting back into comics – I started with characters I liked, teams, these things. It’s the way that comics are presented and sold, especially by Marvel and DC. However, as I started noticing the authors, like the often-written-about Jonathan Hickman, I have followed some of them – right over to their independent projects.

In many media, there’s more than one creator you might follow, like directors or actors. I mean, we’ve seen just about everything Joss Whedon.

And overall, the things I have enjoyed most, that I get the most enjoyment from, are these additional finds from creators I have already found and enjoyed. Yes, there’s joy in finding a new random find, and maybe those are truly the best finds – but to find one random great find can often take either a bunch of research or recommendations, or else a lot of bad finds to come across one good find. The work of the trying things out and recommending good things is absolutely the work of a blog, but it’s also hard to recommend this.

That’s what I’ve got. Still, doesn’t feel helpful, because even as I list creators I like, it doesn’t necessarily help anyone else – though I’ll say again, read some Hickman! But that’s also why I feel like my answer is so unhelpful, because it’s so unspecific. And while on the one hand it might seem obvious, it’s also often something you have to consciously do.

Most of the time, crossovers between fictional properties are the stuff of fanfiction. In comics, though, they’re a longstanding tradition. In some cases, like with Star Trek, there are comics based on ...

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“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.”
― Simon Pegg